The congressional push follows Axios and Financial Times reports that Lutnick and Commerce Undersecretary Jeff Kessler stalled adding Alice Huang’s Singapore-based cloud firm, Megaspeed, to the US Entity List despite four other agencies backing the move and President Donald Trump authorizing a crackdown on chip smugglers three times this year. At a Nov 5 Oval Office meeting where Elon Musk joined Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in backing tighter curbs, Lutnick warned the restrictions “will start a trade war with China” before Trump ordered, “Let’s get it done,” Axios reported. In a White House Situation Room meeting the same day, Bessent asked why Megaspeed was still not blacklisted and Lutnick replied, “I don’t know. I’ll look into it,” according to Axios.

The Commerce Department denied the confrontation between Bessent and Lutnick and disputed parts of the Axios account, while a White House official told Semafor that Trump “maintains complete confidence” in Lutnick. Still, Senate Republicans joined the criticism of Commerce leadership, with Senator John Kennedy saying Lutnick “needs to answer that in front of God and country.” Megaspeed bought more than $4 billion of advanced Nvidia hardware for Southeast Asian data centers and is suspected of diverting chips to China, while the fallout from Jensen Huang’s relationship with Alice Huang has already triggered an FBI investigation, a review by Nvidia’s independent directors and a proposed investor class action lawsuit, Reuters reported.